


Stay Lost On Our Way Home

by robotsfighting



Category: Glee
Genre: Blaine+Tina Friendship, M/M, S4 Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 07:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsfighting/pseuds/robotsfighting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Blaine Anderson and Tina Cohen-Chang became the new glee power couple (in a totally platonic way).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay Lost On Our Way Home

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes some of the ideas about the seniors passing the torch from [my last fic](http://robotsfighting.livejournal.com/8721.html) and applies them to the first week of Blaine and Tina's senior year. I started it before _Goodbye_ aired, so it became a little AU-ish; sorry about that! I'm not quite as psychic as I'd hoped. (Except that I was very slightly psychic about the thing with _The Notebook_.) Many, many thanks to stoney321 for her excellent beta skills, and to flaming_muse for being so lovely and encouraging. The title comes from [C'Mon](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klHpznbGeYc), by Fun. and Panic! at the Disco.

When Kurt left for NYADA, Blaine spent three days in bed. He watched terrible Lifetime movies and moved solely to use the bathroom and procure the only snack food in his house, which turned out to be a stale bag of pretzels from a party his parents had thrown over the summer. It was a misery which was profound and heavy and consistently terrible, and it took every ounce of his already tenuous self-control to keep from texting Kurt basically all of the time. Three entire days of this. Eventually he ran out of pretzels and resorted to the case of expensive chocolates someone had sent his mother from Belgium. She wasn’t there to be upset with him about it, and at that point he didn’t care what she thought.

On the fourth day, Tina called and said they needed a Girls’ Night.

So that was how Blaine ended up on his couch with Tina, _The Notebook_ , and half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, huddled in all of the blankets from all of the rooms in his house. Blaine felt his heart drop down to his stomach and then down to the floor when the characters in the movie started dancing in the middle of the street and Billie Holiday started singing about _seeing you in all the old familiar places_. But he felt Tina’s hand sneak into his, and glanced at her to see that she wasn’t looking at him, but her eyes were bright with tears the way he knew his own were, and he knew that she _got it_ , in a way that no one else probably would.

* * *

“I can’t believe that Lima Middle still uses this laser background in their yearbook photos,” Tina said from where she was sprawled on her stomach on Blaine’s bed. “It’s like the definition of tacky. My dad burned his elementary school portraits when he found them a few years ago because he asked for the _Tron_ background and it looked like he was trapped in a wormhole or something.”

Blaine grinned over his shoulder in the mirror. Tina was swinging her feet back and forth, slowly turning the pages of a yearbook she’d managed to intimidate off of one of her younger brother’s friends. “I can actually see your dad doing that.” He’d had met Mr. Cohen-Chang a few times during the summer, when Tina invited him to her house. Blaine had found him sort of geeky and adorable, not that he would ever tell her so. “What do you think?” he asked, turning around to face her. “Stripes or no stripes?” He held the bowties he had been considering up to his collar, side by side.

Tina looked up from the yearbook and squinted at him. “What are you looking for, here?”

“I’m planning my outfit for tomorrow.” He looked down at the ties, frowning. “I think the solid one. The stripes are a little loud with this shirt.” When he looked back up at her, he found Tina smirking at him, biting her lip to keep from laughing. He rolled his eyes and tossed the ties back into the drawer with the others, then pushed it closed. “Whatever. Your fashion sense hasn’t changed since the nineteen-sixties.”

“They say socks are in this year,” Tina said breezily, turning the page. “And pants that go down past your ankles. What did Kurt say?”

Blaine couldn’t help his quick smile at the mention of Kurt. He’d had plenty of advice, all of it unasked for and delivered with the quick-march rant of a makeover professional, peppered with compliments ( _would bring out your eyes, Blaine, you have such gorgeous eyes, now I miss your stupid **eyes**_ ) and given while running between orientation activities at NYADA ( _everyone is just like Gerber Baby Girl, I don’t know how I’m going to survive four years of a thousand Rachels_ ). He’d sent Blaine a text with a photo of his own first-day-of-classes outfit, half-turned in his full-length mirror: a barely-gray button-up under a charcoal waistcoat with a shining gunmetal silk back, dove gray jeans practically painted on. The message attached to it was, _Wish me luck_. Groggy and still mostly asleep at seven thirty in the morning during what was still his summer, Blaine had opened the photo and texted back that Kurt wouldn’t need it.

“I didn’t ask,” he said lightly, sitting down on the bed next to Tina’s shoulder. Tina made a derisive little noise, and he sighed. “He had _suggestions_.”

“Did he tell you to lose the bowties?” Tina asked. “Because that’s my main bit of advice.”

Blaine nudged her arm. “Shut up. I didn’t let you come over so you could mock my sartorial choices.” He leaned closer to look down at the book, open to two pages filled with rows of awkwardly-photographed pre-teens, all of them caught somewhere between catatonic and ecstatic. “Do you honestly think you can learn something about the freshman from their eighth grade yearbook? Most of them look like they’re dying.”

Tina shrugged, and Blaine bounced with the movement. “Our best bets for glee candidates are kids who either look really uncomfortable or really enthusiastic.” She pointed at a photo of a girl with a truly impressive piece of orthodontic equipment welded into her face. “I bet we could convince her to join.”

“Her headpiece would look awesome under the stage lights.”

Tina laughed, then trailed off, letting the pads of her fingers travel over the faces spread between the pages. “This is probably going to sound weird,” she murmured, not looking at Blaine, “but I’m sort of excited about the club being really small again.”

Blaine tilted his head, peering curiously down at the shining black of Tina’s hair. It was something that had been worrying him, a little. Building from himself, Tina, Artie, Joe and Sugar into a twelve-piece group for competitions was going to difficult. “Why?”

Tina shrugged again. “I don’t know. I guess – I like that we’re starting over. It was fun in the beginning, when we had no idea what we were doing. I mean, it was fun last year, too, but back when the club first started, we had to rely on each other so much.” Her voice softens. “It’ll be nice, to start finding new people who fit in with us and make us better.”

A smile tilted its way over Blaine’s lips, nostalgic fondness warming his chest. He loved when Tina talked about the first year of New Directions. She always sounded like Kurt did when he described how the club was back then, how important it became for all of them. They both got so hushed and breathless about it, like it was sacred, their history. It made him love both of them a little more every time. 

“It will,” he agreed quietly. “I’m excited about that, too.”

Tina reached out and tucked her hand into his. “I’m glad you’re my co-captain,” she said, smiling.

Blaine squeezed her hand. “I am, too.”

“Although maybe Headpiece Girl will be a little distracting.”

“Let’s see how well she sings before we rule her out.”

* * *

Mr. Schuester started his First Day of School Morning Meeting by writing _NEW NEW DIRECTIONS_ in big letters across the white board. _That’s our lesson this week,_ he’d said. _Let’s find out where we’re going this year. Let’s find our voice again._

The words started a little anticipatory buzz in Blaine’s head that followed him around all day. That voice was small right now; Sugar and Joe had stayed, as he’d hoped, and Artie, of course. (Artie had wheeled right over the second he’d walked through the choir room door and pulled Blaine down into what he called a “bro-hug,” followed by the most elaborate of fist-bumps.) Sam had transferred back to Kentucky to be with his family when Kurt and Finn graduated. But the voice would be growing, soon. Auditions were that afternoon, and Mr. Schue seemed optimistic about kids wanting to join. They were national champions, after all. The chairs around the five remaining members wouldn’t be empty for long.

(Those chairs were a little sad, as well. Blaine had seen Tina take a moment when her eyes passed over the place where she and Mike used to sit. As for himself, he’d taken a picture of Kurt’s preferred seat and texted it to him. _Your chair misses you._ Thirty seconds later, he’d gotten Kurt’s response: ` You’re ridiculous. Have a good first day.`

Ten seconds after that: `I miss it, too.`)

The buzz remained, in the back of his mind, through all of his new classes, which mostly went by in a blur of syllabi and textbooks. First days were tiresome, after a while. It was all the same rules about texting and cheating, and there was always the itch to stop talking and _do something_ , which Blaine knew he only really shared with other students in his AP classes, and even then, only a few. First days were also a minefield of first impressions, and the moment when teachers went around the class asking students to introduce themselves never got less mortifying. Blaine remembered enjoying it at Dalton, when everyone would smile at him and they would move on to the next boy. At McKinley, eyes tended to linger while the next student gave his name and his favorite color or his interesting fact. Blaine stood out. He was trying to get used to it, but it wasn’t really working.

So it was with a bit of relief that Blaine dumped all of his new books into his locker at the end of the day. He was in the process of organizing them by section of the day when he heard his name being shouted down the hallway, and turned in surprise to see Tina flying at him, holding something in her hand, shoving past underclassmen trying to scatter out of her way. She stopped just in time to keep from crashing into him and whipped her hair out of her face, smiling so brightly that she seemed to glow.

“Blaine!” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard her screaming it as she ran. “This is either the best or worst thing that’s ever happened to us.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shoved a piece of paper into his hands, and he turned it over, eyebrows furrowed. It was the sign-up sheet that Mr. Schue had tacked to the bulletin board that morning before homeroom. 

“I mean,” Tina continued, “they’re both really talented. Like, crazy talented. I can’t believe they both transferred here. It’s like Rachel and Kurt were reincarnated.”

There were two names on the sheet. Written in careful, looping letters on the first line was _Wade Adams_. On the second line, in giant script, was _Harmony Cook._

“The Gerber Baby,” Blaine murmured to himself. “She even uses gold stars.”

“I _know_!” Tina said. “And Wade _killed_ at Nationals last year. He even made me like _Tommy_ for a few minutes.”

Blaine knew. Someone had recorded Wade’s version of _Starships_ and put it up on YouTube, and Blaine had listened to it on repeat for three weeks, until Kurt had threatened to cut off all contact with him. Unique was incredible. So was Harmony; her _Buenos Aires_ at Sectionals was perfect. She could honestly sing the phone book and Blaine would listen, rapt. It was the same as the way he felt about Rachel’s voice. This was very, very good.

“Why would this be the worst thing that ever happened to us?” Blaine asked, handing the sheet back. “They’re amazing.”

Tina shrugged, tucking it into a folder. “Well, like I said. Kurt and Rachel. They could be serious divas.”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “I’m sure they’re fine. I date Kurt, and we're both friends with Rachel.” He shut his locker and offered her his arm. “Come on. We can’t miss these auditions, they’re going to be incredible.”

* * *

 

“She even did the weird little operatic cadenza at the end. I thought Mr. Schue was going to pass out.” Blaine tucked the phone closer to his ear and spread his other arm out, concentrating on walking a straight heel-to-toe line down the curb between the sidewalk and the street. The afternoon was slowly falling into evening, and the heavy sunlight splashed its way through the trees on either side of the road, throwing the shadows of leaves against the dark asphalt on his walk home.

“I’m not even a little surprised that Gerber Baby thought _Think of Me_ was a good audition song,” Kurt sighed through the receiver. “If ever there was someone to take an opportunity to show off.”

“Come on, Kurt,” Blaine said. “You don’t even know her. Maybe she just really likes _Phantom_.”

“ _You_ don’t know those NYADA mixer kids, Blaine. That girl made Rachel _cry_. When I complimented her on _Buenos Aires_ , she told me that this year was going to be a bloodbath. How do you know she isn’t a spy sent in to divide and conquer and then get out and rejoin her legion of evil at whatever school she actually goes to?”

Blaine snorted, then wobbled a little on the curb and stopped to rebalance himself. “I think you’re being a little paranoid. She was in the Unitards, they don't really seem to be the 'divide and conquer' type.”

“Blaine. Listen to me,” Kurt said, and Blaine smiled at how serious he sounded. “You didn't meet any of my friends for _weeks_ after we started hanging out. That's because everyone would have thought you were a spy, coming to seduce me and then leave me brokenhearted and unable to perform at Sectionals so Dalton would beat us. I'm pretty sure it at least crossed Rachel's mind that you were paying Karofs-- David to harass me and get me to transfer and join the Warblers.” 

There was the sound of a struggle on the other end of the line, until Blaine heard Kurt give a shriek of surprised pain and suddenly Rachel's voice was coming clear, if a little breathless, through the receiver. “I never thought that, Blaine!” she said, earnestly. “I always liked you! I maybe thought it a little. I've been listening to your conversation with Kurt slightly, just due to proximity, our apartment is so very small--”

“You've been invading my personal space for five minutes to hear!” Kurt shouted in the background.

“Hush, Kurt. I'm on the phone. Blaine, we just want you to be aware that New Directions has a history of sabotage, and that as captain you are expected to deal with any instances that may arise. I know it might be difficult, because you have a very friendly personality and you seem to enjoy being approachable and well-liked, but show choir is a serious enterprise, and sometimes it's necessary to destroy people. Who's to say if Harmony is secretly evil, but you never know. Have you looked into bugging her car? I can put you in touch with Lauren Zizes. She's very affordable.”

Blaine was trying _very hard_ not to start laughing. “Thank you, Rachel,” he said, “but I'm sure that Tina and I can handle it. We're not at the point where we want to start illegally bugging anyone. But I'll be sure to call you if we get there.”

“All right, Blaine. I'm choosing to trust you. Just remember that New Directions is my baby, and if you or Tina allow anyone to destroy it from the inside, or if you yourselves run it into the ground, there will be no gift basket big enough to deter my rage. Okay?”

Blaine swallowed. Even delivered in Rachel's _look at me I am so pleasant_ tone, that was actually terrifying. “You, um. You've got it, Rachel.”

“Have a good evening! Say 'hi' to Tina and Artie and Sugar and Joe for me!”

“Er. Will do.”

The was another, briefer sound of shuffling, and then Kurt was back. “I am so sorry about that,” he said sincerely. “She's been nuts the last few weeks. I think the level of talent here scares her. I told you about what she did to Sunshine Corazon, right? She's still one of the best, but she's not the best _enough_. Cry me a river.”

Blaine chose the ignore the _Kurt!_ screamed in the background. “It's fine,” he said, smiling. “I know she's under a lot of pressure.”

Kurt snorted. “Rachel's better under pressure. She thinks of it like coal being pressed into diamonds. It's actually kind of frightening. This level of crazy only ever happens when she doesn't know how to deal with something.” He paused. “I think she misses everyone from glee.”

“I miss her, too. And you.”

Kurt sighed, and they were quiet for a moment. Blaine quit his balance-beam walk on the curb and stepped over to the sidewalk, looking down at the breaks between the pale, perfect squares. Missing Kurt was a constant ache buried deep inside of him, flaring at times to pulse warmly in his chest at a memory, or to engulf him entirely, making it difficult to breathe through how miserable it was to not have Kurt at an arm’s length, or a fifteen minute drive. It was getting a little better, over time, but not much. He missed Kurt more than he could actually put into words.

Kurt broke the silence with another sigh. “Anyway,” he lilted, “now that we’ve had our daily pity party.” Blaine laughed a little at that, and he could hear Kurt’s smile start to warm his voice. “You didn’t tell me about Wade’s audition. Is he just as amazing off-stage?”

Blaine’s own smile faded. He adjusted his bag over his shoulder. “Kurt?” he asked. “When you met Wade, did he seem – sad, to you?”

“I – well,” Kurt said, sounding confused. “I don’t know. He seemed shy. But very sweet. Why? Is he okay?”

“I – don’t know?” Blaine said. “I mean, I can’t tell if it’s just how he is, or if it’s something else, but – he sang _If I Were A Boy_ for his audition today. And it was beautiful, Kurt, really. Tina was crying by the second line. He put so much emotion into it, and he sounded incredible.” 

Wade had stood at the front of the choir room and given everything to that song. It was heartbreaking. Just the way he looked, like it was shattering him to let the words leave him. And he didn’t look at anyone. He closed his eyes, or looked at the floor, or over their heads. And when he was done, he just twitched a smile at them that didn’t really make it to his eyes, and he sat down in the stunned silence. Then Sugar reached over and wrapped her arms around him and told him that he sounded just like the girl who won MVP last year at Nationals, only better because he made her feel bad for him.

“I don’t know if there’s a problem,” Blaine murmured. “But it’s a pretty telling song choice.”

“Talk to him,” Kurt said immediately. “See if there’s something you can help him with. When he spoke to me and Mercedes for the first time last year, he made it sound like things weren’t great at home, or at school. He probably needs someone to talk to.”

Blaine stopped at the gate to his house and looked up the path to his front door. His parents’ cars weren’t in the driveway, so they hadn’t managed to make it home today. “I don’t think that I have a great track record of giving good advice,” he said slowly. “Look what happened when I tried to help you.”

“It was good advice, just not for that situation. And besides,” Kurt said, in a voice that egged Blaine into smiling again. “You probably know what you’re talking about this time.”

* * *

Blaine had intended to speak to Wade as soon as he saw him the next day, but that didn’t happen. It was like Wade disappeared the second he was out of the choir room, and no matter where Blaine looked, he was nowhere to be found. It didn’t help that at every turn, Harmony appeared, all bright-eyed and carrying sheet music, suggesting solos suited to her voice for Sectionals.

“We only have seven members, Harmony,” Blaine told her as she followed him down the hallway to his locker, after ambushing him again as he came out of Trigonometry. “We aren’t really thinking about Sectionals right now.”

“Oh, I know!” she said, hurrying to keep up with him while shuffling the music in her hands. “I’d just like to be prepared. There are only so many days between then and now, and why waste any time when we already have me? Now, I was thinking, since I was amazing at _Think of Me_ at auditions, and I’ve seen enough recordings of Warbler performances to know that you’re a strong tenor, maybe we could sing _All I Ask Of You_! It’s a good duet to show off our strengths, and even if you can’t keep up with me vocally, Christine’s parts are more interesting, so the judges will notice less.”

All of this was delivered breathlessly and through a huge, bright smile, and Blaine could hardly keep up enough to be that vague, tired kind of offended that he used to be whenever Rachel or Puck said anything ridiculous. (And anyway, Raoul’s parts were obviously more interesting.) He spun his combination into his locker and pulled it open. “It’s nice that you’re thinking this far ahead,” he told her, switching his books out to the second half of the day, “but we’re really just trying to focus on getting members right now. We’re putting together some group numbers to do for the school to get kids interested in joining. If you have suggestions for those, we’d be happy to hear them.”

“Group numbers like, the group harmonizing and swaying behind the lead?”

Blaine smiled a little, straightening the notebooks he’d just swapped out. “No,” he said. “We’re doing popcorn leads. Everyone sings a few lines.”

Harmony’s smile faltered. “But there’s – there’s still a real lead, right?”

Blaine shut his locker and turned to her, resettling his bag over his shoulders. “Harmony,” he said, “It’s great that you’re so passionate about this. Really. We’re going to need that passion. But not every song is going to have a lead, and when it does have a lead, the soloist isn’t always going to be you.” He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “You have a beautiful voice, you know that. But you need to understand, in this group, that isn’t what it’s about.”

Harmony’s smile cracked right down the middle. She went very still under Blaine’s hand, and Blaine felt the stir of something uncomfortable in his stomach at the look in her eyes. She blinked a few times, then took a little aborted breath and said, “I, um. I have to--”

Then she ducked out from under Blaine’s hand and hurried off down the hallway with careful little steps, her skirt swaying prettily, Mary Janes making soft sounds on the linoleum.

Blaine stared after her, with no idea what he did.

 

`From: Blaine  
She looked terrified. Like I’d just threatened to kill her or something.`

`From: Kurt  
This is what you get for volunteering to be in charge of a bunch of people  
you knew were bound to be crazy. You should have known it would  
be like herding cats.`

 

Blaine’s AP European History teacher kept him late after class that afternoon. Or, truthfully, their conversation about King James I bled over the final bell, and Blaine only realized when he happened to glance at his watch and see that he was already ten minutes late for glee rehearsal. With hurried apologies to Mr. Singh, he gathered his bag and took off down the hall toward the opposite side of the school, where the choir room lay. He knew that Tina and Mr. Schue could run through warm-ups and start on choreography, but he felt bad for making them do it alone, and pushed faster – which is why he didn’t notice the puddle of sugary ice on the floor until he’d lost his legs from under him and fallen onto his back in the middle of the hallway. 

He lay there for a moment, dazed, feeling the wet squelch under his shoulders. He blinked up at the pocked ceiling tiles, trying to pull air back in his lungs, then made himself roll over and push up onto his hands and knees, still dizzy. On the floor in front of him was a weak, melted puddle of watery purple, and moving away from it, little splashes, getting smaller, leading to the boys’ bathroom. 

A little dagger of fear cut through the dizzy haze in Blaine’s head. 

He pulled himself up off of the floor and carefully slip-slid his way to the bathroom, letting his hands rest on the door for a moment before he forced himself to push it open and look. 

Blaine knew what slushie smelled like. He’d learned last year, when he couldn’t get the cherry out of his skin, when he had resembled a spy movie villain for a week and a half. It had clung to the inside of his head for days, and he’d never forgotten the feeling of it, past the pain of the rock salt: freezing cold and sudden and dripping into his hoodie, making him shake hard in the emergency room while he had waited to be seen. It was sticky, and embarrassing, and it had felt like neither of those things would ever wash away.

The air in the bathroom hung thick with the sugary grape smell. Wade stood at the sinks, encrusted in it. He looked like he’d been hit from all sides. The ice stained his skin bruise-purple as he scraped it from his cheek and flung it into the sink, more dripping down from his hair. He lifted his eyes to the mirror to get more, and they widened when they landed on Blaine, still standing in the doorway.

Feeling his own shock on his face, Blaine asked softly, “What happened?”

He immediately regretted it. Wade let out a miserable laugh and went back to clawing dark ice from his neck. “What does it look like?” he asked, and Blaine could hear the sway of Unique under his voice, so different from the quiet way he’d introduced himself before his song on Tuesday. He cast another handful into the sink, spraying ice across the mirror. “They threw me a Welcome Home party.”

Blaine swallowed past the sudden dryness in his throat. “God, Wade, I’m so – here, let me--” He moved for the paper towel dispenser, letting the door swing shut behind him.

Wade’s voice stopped him before he could get any closer.

“They told me it was better here,” he said, soft, but angry. Trembling a little, like he was holding it in. “Kurt and Mercedes said that New Directions took care of each other, that it was different here, but it isn’t.” He whirled around to face Blaine, who stood frozen halfway across the room. “They said it would be _better_!” he shouted, with tears under his voice. “But it’s _not_ , I’m still just a _freak_ to everyone and now it's even _worse_ , and it's _never going to get any better_!”

Blaine, frozen, heart in his mouth, eyes wide and staring, could feel himself edging toward full emotional collapse. This was his responsibility, and he had screwed it up _so badly_. Wade was looking at him with eyes so full of misery and blame and tears, and Blaine felt his guilt roaring up around him like a tidal wave. This was what he'd been trusted to take care of, and he'd completely failed. “Please--” he managed. “Let me – I can--”

“Get OUT!” Wade shouted at him. “Just leave me alone!”

So he did. He ran. Right out of the door, and into the hallway; he slipped on the puddle but then caught himself and kept going, trying to lose the sound of Wade’s voice in the ringing echoes of his footfalls.

* * *

 

The metal locker doors were cool through the back of Blaine’s shirt, to his skin. He sat on the stone floor of the locker room, his arms wrapped around his legs, his head resting on his knees, staring at the wooden bench in front of him. His heart was still beating with a dull, pulsing insistence between his ears, and he closed his eyes, trying to block it out, along with everything else. It didn’t work.

Blaine was thirteen years old the first time he stopped by his locker after last period to find the word _FAG_ sprawled across the metal in permanent-marker capitals. And the worst part was that for half a second, because in his middle school the lockers were split down the middle and paired off, Blaine thought that it might not be for him. Maybe it was for Jake Miller, who had the locker next to his, which bore the brunt of the _F_. But, no. Because laughter started somewhere over Blaine’s right shoulder, and when he looked, there they were, a soon-to-be-familiar group of boys, watching him, wolfish grins over blue jackets. One of them was wiggling a Sharpie between his fingers. All of them looked like they wanted to see him hurt.

Jake Miller hadn’t even looked at Blaine when he’d stopped to get his books. He’d just asked, _Can you – get that off?_ in a high, nervous voice, and fled. 

Blaine had spent an hour and a half making the lockers burnt red again.

This was supposed to be something he could help with. Bullies, homophobia – he had experience with those things. He was older now, and he knew what it was like to not be tormented all the time by narrow-minded Neanderthals, so he should have been able to _help_. But the second he’d come back into contact with something so obviously, humiliatingly awful, he’d run away again. 

Wade had turned to look at him, and he was so _angry_. Blaine understood that anger, and it felt so, so awful to be on the other side of it. To receive that kind of helpless hatred.

Blaine wasn’t cut out for this.

As Blaine buried his head further against his knees, he heard the locker room door swing open, and a loud voice asked, “Blaine? Are you in here?”

“This is the boys’ locker room, Tina,” he called dully.

“Oh, God, like I actually care.” Her voice came closer, past the pneumatic swish of the door closing again. Her footsteps stopped at the end of the row of lockers where Blaine was sitting. “What are you doing? I needed you in rehearsal half an hour ago.” 

She sounded annoyed, and Blaine’s guilt settled a little further in his chest. “I quit,” he said, muffled. “I can’t do this.”

Tina dropped onto the bench in front of him with all of her weight. “You can’t,” she said. “I quit first.”

Blaine raised his head to stare at her. She was looking down at her knees, her hands wringing together against them. Her face was drawn and tired. He frowned. “What happened?”

“Harmony came in with more suggestions. This time for group numbers with huge female leads.” Tina sighed and dropped her head to plunge her hands into her hair, making it fall down around her wrists and arms. “I tried to tell her that we’re focusing more on spotlighting everyone’s voices right now, and she went _crazy_. It was worse than any of Rachel Berry’s bitchfits, which is kind of impossible.” She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “She said that I was abusing my power, because I have no talent and I just want to keep her from being seen.” She dropped her hands. “Actually, she screamed it, and then she ran out.”

“You are _so_ talented, Tina,” Blaine murmured, reaching out to put his hand over hers. “Really. I have no idea what she thinks she’s talking about.”

Tina just shook her head, looking up at the ceiling. “I know. I don’t know.” She sighed. “Whatever. I don’t want to do this anymore.” She looked back to him. “Wait. Why are you on the floor? What happened?”

Blaine tucked his chin back over his knees, resettling his arms around his shins. “Wade got slushied,” he said. “And he blamed me. And I ran away from him.” The words out loud like that dropped something leaden into his stomach. “We’re supposed to be leaders, right? We’re supposed to help him.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even know that anyone was bullying him.”

“That isn’t your fault, Blaine,” Tina said gently. She turned her hand palm-up under his and squeezed. “I haven’t even seen him outside of glee this week--” She trailed off, then groaned. “Which might mean that he was trying to avoid people in the hallway. I should have noticed that. It’s totally classic anti-slushie behavior.”

Blaine sighed. “It’s totally classic anti-everything behavior.”

Tina laced her fingers into his and smiled down at him softly. “This isn’t really what we thought it would be like, is it?”

“No,” Blaine agreed, twitching a smaller smile back up at her. “I didn’t expect to be like parents. Finn and Rachel weren’t like parents.”

“Finn and Rachel were the same age as us. They had the same amount of experience as everybody else, they were just louder about it.” She shrugged. “We have at least a year up on everyone in the club right now, except Artie. You have a lot of experience from the Warblers, and I’ve been running around in the background of New Directions for three years, so we know how it works. We know what it’s supposed to be like.”

Blaine watched the careful, absent way Tina’s thumb swept constant little arcs against his skin where she was holding his hand. “But it _isn’t_ like that,” Blaine said quietly. “I want it to be the way it was before.”

Tina was silent, but she squeezed his hand again.

“I miss everyone,” Blaine said. He could feel himself starting to cry, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. “I hate that they’re all gone now. I don’t know how they made everything work the way it did, but it _worked_ , even when everyone hated each other. I miss that feeling, when I’d walk into the choir room and everyone was already there and it just felt like we all belonged.” He missed Santana, and Puck, and Rachel’s constant intensity, and Finn’s speeches, and Kurt, everything about him – Brittany, Mercedes, Sam, Quinn, Rory – they made the club feel like a family. “We make the club feel like a club,” he whispered.

“No, hey, stop--” Tina slipped off of the bench and next to Blaine, clutching his hand to her chest, and he could see with a little bubble of miserable laughter in his throat that she was about ten seconds from crying, too. “You weren’t here in freshman year, you don’t know how everything started. The first few weeks were awful.” She laughed, a little brokenly. “Everyone actually hated each other. It was all about solos and Rachel being crazy and storming out and us getting, like, constantly slushied by people who eventually joined the club anyway – it was a mess.” She rolled her eyes. “It was like us, right now. It didn’t feel good until we started really singing together.”

Blaine used his free hand to rub the tear tracks off of his face, taking little, controlled breaths that still hitched in the middle. He could feel the embarrassed blush heating his skin, but he swallowed it down. Tina didn’t care. “When was that?” he asked.

A fond look slipped over her face. “We did an invitational – it was the first actual performance we had, and Rachel wasn’t there for the first half of it, because she was being a diva and doing the musical instead, because Mr. Schue gave me a song from _West Side_ to sing, and God forbid anyone sing anything but her – but, anyway. We sang _Somebody to Love_ in the second half, with everyone there, finally, and – I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It just kind of came together. We were this team, suddenly. It wasn’t perfect, and we weren’t _really_ together until the end of the year, but then it was amazing. When we thought glee was going to be disbanded, we all had a meltdown in Mr. Schue’s living room. I think that was when we all realized how much we really needed each other.”

Blaine smiled a little, imagining it. The group really must have been the definition of _ragtag_ in the beginning, from the stories he’d heard. Full of spies and saboteurs and divas. But they all came together, eventually, and became the club _he_ knew, full of people who would constantly fight, but also happily do anything for one another. 

He let out a breath. “So you think we’ll get there?”

“Blaine.” She reached out with her free hand to take his chin and make him meet her eyes. “I promise,” she said, earnestly, like there was no way it couldn’t be true. “We’re going to get there. It’s just going to happen, one day. We won’t even need to do anything except be ourselves. That’s all it takes.”

Blaine reached out and pulled her into a hug.

She collapsed against him, laughing into his chest, and he held onto her tightly, his head tucked down against hers. “Thank you,” he said, meaning it with every fiber in his body.

Tina just nodded, and shook her hand out of his where it was trapped between them to hug him back. They must have looked strange, folded into the space between the lockers and the bench, half-lying on the floor, both sort-of crying and sort-of laughing, but Blaine didn’t care. He held her back harder, every part of him coursing with relief like oxygenated blood.

“So you aren’t quitting?” he asked quietly, with a watery smile.

He felt her back shake with a laugh. “No,” she said, muffled against his shirt. “I didn’t really mean it. Are you?”

“No,” he murmured. “There’s too much I want to see happen, to quit now.”

* * *

 

The night Tina asked Blaine to be her co-captain, the Chicago skyline shone curved and distorted above them in the Bean.

(The Bean, it turned out, was Blaine’s favorite part of Chicago. It was a big, metal, bean-shaped statue in the middle of a public square three blocks from their hotel; its actual name was the Cloud Gate, but he never heard anyone call it that. It was just _the Bean_. He and Kurt had taken a picture together under it on their first day there, during pretty much the only hour they had free between intense practice sessions. It widened and reshaped their reflections, making their smiles huge, their arms around each other long and narrow. Kurt said it was the only picture Blaine had ever taken that made him look worse, and Blaine laughed and made it the background of his phone.)

Back at the hotel, New Directions was still awake at one in the morning and bouncing on the queen beds in Mr. Schue’s hotel room, singing Queen songs and reveling in their victory. The square, spread out before Blaine and Tina in wide stretches of pavement, was quiet and empty but for them, and the bottle of sparkling cider that Tina had swiped from the ice bucket as she pulled Blaine out into the hall and down the stairs. She’d asked first, of course, grinning and whispering in his ear to see if he would mind leaving the party for a little while. _I want to talk to you about something._

Beside him, Tina was staring up at the buildings caught in the metallic curve of the statue, the reflected lights falling against her face in erratic patterns that made Blaine smile. She glanced at him, and caught him looking, then smiled back. She passed him the bottle of sparkling cider, which seemed to glow emerald green when the lights struck it in the air between them, and he took it and swigged with his head tilted back. The chilled bite of it made him cough, and he passed it back to her with his hand over his mouth, glaring while she laughed at him.

She took her own swig, then set the bottle aside and leaned back on her arms, still staring up and smiling. “We won,” she said quietly.

He’d heard the words so many times in the last few hours they were starting to lose meaning, but the feeling they inspired never lessened or changed: a delighted little chill. They’d _won_. _Nationals_.

“I know,” he said. He still couldn’t believe it was true.

They fell quiet again. He reached out for the bottle and lifted it again, taking a smaller swallow this time, enjoying the crisp taste that always reminded him of holidays and young victories and Kurt, oddly enough, who always complemented a home-cooked meal for two with sparkling something-or-other in the place of wine. When he placed it back on the pavement with a tiny _clink_ , his arm caught the refracted light in little dots, and he moved to watch the spread of them over his hands, like fireflies gathered together on his palms.

“Artie doesn’t want to be my co-captain next year,” Tina said, out of nowhere.

Blaine blinked, then looked over at her, eyebrows furrowed. “What?” he asked. “Why not?”

Tina shrugged, sighing. “He said that Mr. Schue is expecting him to direct two musicals next year, one in fall and one in spring, plus he wants to start working with community theater.” She glanced at him with a small smile. “He says that he doesn’t want to have to take care of the casts of the musicals _and_ the glee club, and everything else, all at the same time. And he wants the co-captain to be the male lead of the club.”

Blaine frowned. “Artie _is_ going to be the male lead of the club.”

But Tina was shaking her head, smile growing a little bit. “Nope.” She pointed at him, squinting and rotating her finger in little circles. “I’m looking at the male lead right now.”

Blaine was almost tempted to look over his shoulder for someone standing behind him. He could feel his surprise pushing a warm blush into his cheeks, and was suddenly glad for the dark. “But--” he spluttered, “I’ve only been here for a year. Artie’s been here since the beginning. He deserves to be male lead.”

Tina dropped her hand, grinning. “I thought so, too, but Artie doesn’t see it that way. He says that your stage presence is stronger than his, and you have more experience singing lead, so you should do it.” A touch of fond wonder spread over her face, gentling her expression. “Artie’s just like that. I don’t know why I was so surprised. Although he said he has full control over whether or not he gets solos at competitions.”

Blaine laughed. “Deal. Whatever he wants.” He could feel excitement starting to well up in his chest. He’d loved the opportunities he’d had this year, but singing lead again, for this group – that was going to be amazing. But – “Wait,” he said, frowning again. “You’re asking _me_ to be co-captain?”

Tina nodded. “I know it’s sort of sudden. Sorry. Just – I think you could do it.” She tilted her head, looking at him, with half of the lights in Chicago falling in patches over her face. “I’d like to do it with you,” she said easily. “We could make a good team.”

Blaine smiled. It felt silly and fond and too wide for his face. “I think so, too,” he said. He held his hand out between them. “I’m in.”

They shook on it, with their clasped hands casting one long shadow under the belly of the Bean.

* * *

 

“We’ll find him tomorrow,” Tina said, looking over Blaine’s shoulder as he held open the door to the boys’ bathroom. The air was still tinged with grape and sugar, the sink Wade had been standing at still puddled and tacky with it, but Wade was long gone. She put her hand on Blaine’s arm. “We’ll talk to both of them, him and Harmony. Okay?

We can do it together.”

* * *

 

Blaine knew that he and Tina shared a lunch period with Harmony from the previous day, when she had spent the time smiling at them across the table and commandeering the conversation in the direction of how perfectly suited her voice was to everything in the American songbook. In any other situation, it would have sort of been a relief when she didn’t show up the day after she shouted at Tina in the choir room. As it was, it just made things more difficult.

They found her, after a while of searching, sitting in the stands on the football field. She was staring unhappily down at a group of Cheerios practicing whatever overcomplicated routine Coach Sylvester had assigned them; she looked faintly miserable, mechanically lifting prepackaged apple slices to her mouth. Blaine stopped Tina at the bottom of the metal bleachers and shared a significant, confused look with her, but she just shrugged. Harmony looked like someone had taken a pin to her and let all of the air out. Even her hair looked wilted.

Blaine and Tina picked their way up and along the benches, and Harmony didn’t even acknowledge their presence until they were sitting on either side of her, following her gaze down to the Cheerios. 

“They called me fat,” she said cheerlessly, not looking away. She dropped an apple slice back into the bag. “And they said that I looked like the kind of person who has a lot of body hair, which I thought was sort of creative for a moment, but now I just hate them.”

Blaine and Tina shared another look over her head, then Blaine asked, “Why are you still sitting out here, then?”

Harmony’s shoulders drooped more. She tucked the bag of apples back into the pack lunch in her lap. “I didn’t want you to find me,” she said quietly. Then she nodded at the cheerleaders down on the football field. “And I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of making me leave.”

“I can put spiders in their lockers,” Tina told her. “They already think I’m a vampire or something. I’m pretty sure that vampires can control spiders, right? Or was that--”

“Why are you being nice to me?” Harmony interrupted, looking hard at Tina beside her. Blaine was struck, not for the first time, by how _intense_ Harmony could appear, like all of her focus was pulled narrowly in on whoever she was looking at. It could probably be flattering, if used correctly, but at that moment it sort of looked like a knife to the throat. “I was so mean to you yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you want us to find you?” Blaine asked, trying to defuse her a little.

Harmony looked away from Tina to frown down at her hands in her lap. “Because you’re going to kick me out of the club,” she said dully. 

There was a long pause between the three of them. The only sound was the shout of a tempo down in the field, and the distant sounds of gym classes playing softball brought over on the breeze.

And then Tina started laughing, the way Blaine knew she would, while he cracked a ridiculous smile at Harmony. She stared between them, whipping her head back and forth, looking like she was ready to be angry, but was too confused to start, and Blaine reached out to pat her knee. 

“We’re not going to kick you out,” he told her brightly, “so don’t worry.”

Tina was wiping tears of mirth out of her eyes. “That didn’t even _occur_ to me,” she said. She was still giggling, looking at Blaine. “Can you imagine if Mr. Schue kicked Rachel out the first time she yelled at everyone and flounced out of the choir room? We’d still be singing _Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat_. Harmony, there’s no way we could kick you out. No one gets kicked out. Except when you set a piano on fire, and even then, not for long.”

Harmony’s whole face pulled down into a frown. “I can honestly say that I’ve never been more confused than I am right now.”

“New Directions doesn’t kick people out,” Blaine reassured her. “Even if they deserve it, which you probably don’t. We work things out with each other.”

Harmony seemed to take a moment to internalize this. The breeze fluttered in around them, lifting the brown paper of Harmony’s lunch bag and unsettling her hair, which she reached up to fix absently. “This really isn’t how I thought this conversation would go,” she murmured. She glanced at Tina, and then suddenly turned her whole body on the bench to face her and take both of her hands. (Blaine grabbed her lunch before it fell down through the bleachers.)

“I’m sorry,” Harmony said earnestly, looking right into Tina’s eyes. “You _are_ talented, and even if your talent is less practiced and refined than mine, I shouldn’t have taken my frustration out on you. So, thank you. For not kicking me out of the club. I promise I’ll never have an outburst like that again.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Blaine muttered, setting her lunch on the bench below them. 

Over him, Tina said, “It’s fine! Uh, really.” She took her hands out of Harmony’s with a vaguely uncomfortable, overwhelmed smile. “So, um. We wanted to talk to you about why you decided to yell at me and storm out of rehearsal like a crazy person.”

“Does it have anything to do with the conversation you and I had yesterday in the hallway?” Blaine asked a little more gently. He sent an unamused glare to Tina behind Harmony’s back. “When I told you that we’re focusing on group numbers?”

Harmony looked at him for a moment. He could see it again, behind her eyes: the fear that had appeared so strangely yesterday, resurfacing. She bit her lip, and was obviously weighing something in her mind. She drew herself a little straighter. “Have you ever seen the show _Dance Moms_? Or _Toddlers and Tiaras_?”

“Yes,” Blaine said, at the same time Tina said, “No.” Blaine blushed when Tina leaned around Harmony to stare at him in accusatory surprise. “They’re two of Kurt’s guilty pleasure shows,” he said, squirming under her scrutiny. “He says they lower his expectations of the world to a realistic level.”

Tina sat back again, mostly mollified. “My mom won’t let anyone in my house watch anything where everyone seems like a bitch, so that rules out most reality television.”

“My mom _is_ those people,” Harmony sighed. “My dad, too.”

_Oh,_ Blaine thought. Suddenly so much about the way Harmony acted made sense. In a completely ridiculous way, obviously, but that was sort of par for the course now, if he was being honest.

“Oh, God,” Tina said, as it hit her, too. “You're a pageant baby.”

Harmony nodded. “I won every competition they entered me in, until my mom was banned from the pageant circuit because she had a habit of attacking the judges when they gave me low scores.” She looked up at them. “We’ve moved six times so that I could reenter in other counties, but eventually they figured out what she was doing and now at every beauty pageant in Ohio there’s a picture of my mother at the sign-in desk saying that she should be escorted from the premises. But my talent was always singing, so when I got to middle school, they decided that I should do competitive show choir, instead. Same chance of winning, less possibility of arrest.”

She put her elbows on her knees and dropped her chin into her hands. “When the Unitards lost at Sectionals last year, my parents got the Defiance High choir director fired, and then when New Directions won at Nationals, they decided that we’d move to Lima over the summer so I could join – as my mother put it, _the major leagues_. They knew that Rachel Berry was graduating, so there would be a void where her talent had been.” She glanced at Tina. “Sorry. Anyway, that’s why I got a little overemotional yesterday when I heard that we aren’t going to be featuring performers.” 

Tina frowned at her. “You think you need to get solos to get your parents' approval?”

“No,” Harmony said, her eyes very large. “I have to _win_ to get their approval. Do you know how many trophies we have in our house? A whole room. We had to rent a separate truck to get them here. They need me to be the featured lead. Between sessions of freaking out about you guys kicking me out of the club, I spent all last night trying to think of ways to subtly overthrow Tina so I could be the only female voice. Sorry, again,” she said quickly to Tina. “I promise I'm not going to hit you with a metal baton like Tonya Harding.”

“Uh, good,” Tina said, eyebrows furrowed. “But – you know, winning isn't what New Directions is about. Blaine and I are actually okay with the idea of losing Sectionals this year.”

Blaine nodded. They'd discussed this a little, on the drive back from Chicago, and over the summer. The important thing was creating a group that worked well together and could go on do to well next year. They both knew that three seasoned glee members, two who had hardly been there a year, and at least seven people who may never have done a jazz square in their lives wasn't really the recipe for another Nationals win – maybe not even a Sectionals win – but they could at least lay a foundation for the next few years. 

But Harmony looked horrified at this news. “You – but--” she sputtered. “But what’s the _point_?”

“It’s fun,” Blaine said simply. “And it helps, sometimes. Glee club can get to be kind of like group therapy. At least, it can with us. We tend to sing our feelings.”

“Some of us do, anyway,” Tina mumbled. 

“What I’m saying is,” Blaine said a little louder, speaking over Tina, “we all do glee because we love it, not because we want to win. If you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s fine – but we want you to be.” And Blaine really did, he realized then. He wanted Harmony’s voice in the choir room with theirs, not just because it was beautiful, but because he knew that it belonged there. “I think that maybe it would be good for you,” he told her.

“I don’t know,” Harmony murmured. She looked out at the Cheerios again. The period was drawing to a close, and they were all standing in a loose group, discussing something, with the occasional derisive laugh drifting up to the bleachers. “I don’t know what my parents will do when they find out I might not even be competing. That was the whole reason for coming here.”

“Well, maybe just don’t tell them,” Tina said. 

Harmony looked at her, frowning. “You think I should lie to my parents?”

“It isn’t _lying_.” Tina sounded only vaguely sure of this, but went on anyway. “It’s just – masking the truth a little. Seriously, Harmony, your voice is amazing. You’re probably going to be featured at Sectionals, if we manage to get enough people to go. And you can’t tell me that you love the fact that your parents make you do all of this stuff for _them_. Maybe you should do something for yourself for a change.” She paused. “Do you actually like to sing?”

“Yes,” Harmony said immediately, without even a breath between question and answer. She blushed. “I mean,” she continued, backpedaling, “I’m very good at it, and that’s part of it, but – I feel the most like myself when I’m singing.” Her voice went very small, and she folded down into herself on the bench, not looking at either of them. “I like feeling everything else go away. When I’m not competing, I mean. When I’m just singing because I can. It makes me feel like I can control something.”

Blaine pushed down the urge to reach out and hug her. She looked so small that way, with her back hunched and her eyes down, saying those things like it was so difficult to let the words go, completely different from the girl who sang _Buenos Aires_ and _Think Of Me_ and followed him around with sheet music for two days. It made him think achingly of Rachel, who had the same self-possessed determination and vulnerability, and even more of Quinn: initially appearing evil, but with something terrified and powerless underneath. He could feel _so much_ that Harmony belonged with them, in the club. New Directions had helped Rachel and Quinn, and everyone else. It could help her, too.

“Sing with us, Harmony,” he said quietly. “You should be able to do something just because you want to.”

She looked at him, with her very, very sad eyes. The wind blew through her hair again, raising it off of her shoulders, but she let it go. She just sniffed quietly, and gave him a very small nod. 

“I’ll think about it,” she whispered.

* * *

 

School had hardly been in session for three days, and Blaine was already charming information out of the secretary in the attendance office. She was nice, and she liked his hair, and his story about glee clubbers decorating the lockers of new members. She gave him Wade’s locker number, after extracting his promise that he wouldn’t do anything untoward with the information. Blaine agreed whole-heartedly, smiling at the way the word _untoward_ fit so easily in her fifty-something Midwestern mouth.

The note that he dropped through the vent of Wade’s locker wasn’t _exactly_ a trap – but, well, it was _basically_ a trap. He hadn’t come to glee rehearsal after The Bathroom Incident, so Blaine didn’t know whether he had decided to drop out of the club entirely, or if he was avoiding Blaine, or if he’d just needed to go home – so he had Tina write to him herself, explaining that she needed to talk to him after school in the choir room about a possible solo for the recruitment performances they were planning. If he’d given up the club, he would ignore it. If he was just avoiding Blaine, he would come. 

When Mr. Schuester wandered into the choir room fifteen minutes after the final bell to find Blaine and Tina sitting together in the front row, he stopped in his tracks. “Hey, guys," he said slowly, confused. "Did I miss a memo?”

“Drama,” Blaine and Tina said at the same time.

“ _Already_?” 

“We’re dealing with it,” Tina said. 

“Although,” Blaine said quickly, glancing at Tina. She raised her eyebrows at him, questioning, but he just looked back at Mr. Schue. “Mr. Schuester, Wade’s being bullied. I found him after he was slushied yesterday.”

Mr. Schue frowned, absently lifting his bag to lay it down on the piano. “I was worried about that,” he said. 

“Is there anything you can do about it?” Tina asked. 

“I’ll talk to Principal Figgins.”

“Can you talk to Coach Sylvester, as well?” When both Schue and Tina stared at him in confusion, Blaine felt himself color a little. “When Kurt was being bullied, she kept an eye on him. I know she’s kind of – distracted, right now, but maybe she could get Coach Washington to help. She seems just as crazy and unpredictable.”

“Don’t I know it,” Mr. Schuester mumbled, taking the sheet music from the piano’s music stand and sliding it carefully into his bag. “I’ll talk to all of them. Okay?”

Tina smiled gratefully. “Thanks, Mr. Schue.”

“No problem.”

There was a cough in the doorway, and all three of them looked at once to see Wade, standing awkwardly between the hall and the choir room. He was watching them with apprehension. 

Mr. Schue quickly closed his bag and slung it back over his shoulder. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” he said with a wave at Tina and Blaine as he turned to leave. Wade stepped into the room to get out of his way, and as he passed, Mr. Schue put a hand on Wade’s shoulder and gave it a brief squeeze. Then he left, and it was just the three of them, alone. Wade still hadn’t said anything. His hands were wrapped in the straps of his bookbag, holding tight to them like a lifeline. The anxiety in his face was echoed in the tenseness of his shoulders, and the way he held himself up, like to stand any taller would make him a target. The image made every part of Blaine ache with sympathy – and it made him so, so tired with remembering what it felt like to be that, to stand like that. No matter how much time passed between then and now, it still felt so close, chasing him down. It was what had made him tell Kurt to stand up. It’s what made him leave his seat now and cross to the door to pull it closed. 

“Hi, Wade,” he said gently, turning to him. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

Wade hesitated for a moment, before releasing his bag and shrugging it off of his shoulders. “Something tells me this isn’t actually about a solo.” 

“Not really.” Tina looked a little guilty. “Sorry.”

Wade crossed over and dropped down on the piano bench, facing away from the keys. As Blaine began to follow back across the room to Tina, Wade looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry.” It made Blaine stop walking, surprised. Wade just kept watching him with a beseeching sort of expression. “I didn’t really mean it, what I said in the bathroom yesterday,” he continued. “I was mad. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. You just wanted to help.”

“It’s fine,” Blaine said with relief. It felt like he was pushing something heavy off of his chest. “Honestly. I’m sorry, too.”

Wade just shook his head. 

Blaine sat back down next to Tina, who asked into the ensuing silence, “Why didn’t you tell us that you were being bullied?”

Wade only shrugged. His head went down, shoulders hunched. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I didn’t know what to do. I was embarrassed, I guess. I guess I thought – when I moved here, I thought, _oh, good, I get to go to McKinley_. I told Kurt and Mercedes last year that I wanted to transfer, but I didn’t think it would actually happen.” His face flashed with something painful, before cinching tight, closing off darkly. “I really wish it hadn’t,” he whispered. 

Blaine could feel something more moving behind those words. Something more than just a slushie, something much worse than that. “Because of the bullying?” he asked carefully.

Wade shook his head again, and took a wet little breath.

Tina was up out of her chair immediately and flying over to him, wrapping her arms around him and holding on tightly. “Shh,” she whispered, when Wade let out a surprised sob. “It’s okay, it’s totally okay.” He wrapped his arms around her, too, clasping them around her back and pulling her closer, his head pressed against her chest. Blaine could see tears coursing silently down his cheeks.

Blaine, frozen solid in his chair, was suddenly, deeply grateful for Tina. Tina was so much better at physical comfort than Blaine. Tina would throw herself around a crying stranger at a bus station to make that person feel better, happily and without question. Blaine couldn’t. Even being familiar with Wade, and his own identity, and the open-mindedness that would come with it, Blaine was afraid of touching people he didn’t really know. He’d had the idea that his touch wasn’t welcome drilled into his brain through his whole stay in middle school. He’d had it literally beaten into him during his freshman year of high school. 

So he was so, so glad, in that moment, and so many before and after it, that Tina was his co-captain.

“They kicked me out,” Wade sobbed into Tina’s chest. “They – they said – they were _embarrassed_ , they told me I had to change, and I wouldn’t, and my whole family hated me because I was famous for being a f-freak, so they told me I had to leave until I – until I got over it.”

Blaine’s his heart lodged itself in his throat and beat heavily between his collarbones. 

Tina was rubbing Wade’s back, her cheek against the top of his head. “It’s okay,” she repeated. Blaine could hear the telling waver in her voice. “I’m so sorry, Wade.”

Blaine stood, almost automatically, and walked across the room to them. He laid a hand on Tina’s back, and one on Wade’s shoulder. “Where--” he tried to ask, but his voice was strangled. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth. He tried again. “Where are you staying?”

Wade’s crying was starting to calm down. He was taking breaths like Blaine’s, huge lungfuls of air moving slowly in and out of him. “My grandmother,” he said, muffled against Tina. “She’s the only one who--” He didn’t finish. He just said, almost broken, “She loves me.”

“She lives in Lima?” Tina asked. “That’s why you transferred?”

Wade nodded. He let go of Tina, and she stepped back to give him room to rub the tear tracks off of his face with both hands. He sniffed one more time. “Sorry,” he said weakly. 

“It’s fine,” Blaine murmured. He stepped away to grab a chair and pull it closer, turning it around and sitting on it backwards, with his arms crossed over the back. Tina settled next to Wade on the bench with her arm around him, flush against his side. “I’m glad that there was someone you could go to.” 

“Me, too,” Wade said. “I didn’t think there would be, but -- after Nationals, and after my parents – she told me that she didn’t care who I was, I was family. I don’t think anyone talks to her anymore.” He wiped at his eyes again, taking another breath. “I spent the whole summer trying to get away from everything that happened last year, but everyone knows.”

“You were trying to get away from it?” Tina asked, eyebrows drawing together. “I thought you loved being Unique.”

Wade closed his eyes, shaking his head back and forth. “I do, but -- look what happened. Maybe I – maybe things would be easier for everyone if I were -- normal.”

“You _are_ normal,” Blaine said, so fiercely that it made Wade look up at him in surprise. Blaine could feel his anger boiling low in his stomach – anger at Wade’s family, anger at the kids who tried to take the strength out of him, anger that he could still feel the sympathetic ache in his ribs from size twelve dress shoes, anger that anyone, ever, could be made to say the words _if I were normal_. “Listen to me, Wade,” he said, reaching out to capture both of Wade’s hands in his. Wade blinked back at him, but met his eyes. “I can’t know exactly how you feel, because we’re different people with difference circumstances. But I know what it feels like to try and suppress something about yourself to make things easier for other people. You need to do what feels right for _you_.” He softened a little. “If you aren’t sure about your identity, that’s fine. You have all the time in the world to figure yourself out. You’re fifteen. But please, don’t let anyone tell you who you need to be for them. Only _you_ have any say in who you are.”

He let go of Wade’s hands and sat back, and Wade kept staring at him with big, overwhelmed eyes. “I--” he said, and faltered for a moment. His eyes filled with tears again. “I’m still not sure. About me. For me. But I feel more like myself when I’m Unique, more than when I’m not. There’s just nowhere I can be her where people won’t hate me for it.”

“Here,” Tina said softly. She tucked her head against Wade’s shoulder. “Be Unique here, in this room, in glee.”

Blaine nodded. “If you can’t be Unique everywhere, you can start in here. We won’t judge you, or hurt you, or anything. That’s what this club is for. You can express yourself however you want to, be whoever you want to be. We’ll be here for you no matter what. And we’ll do our best to take care of you.”

The tears were back to coursing down Wade’s cheeks, and he wiped them away with delicate little swipes of his fingers. His smile was tremulous and small, but it was present, brightening his face. “Kids in Vocal Adrenaline didn’t even know each other’s names.”

“Vocal Adrenaline is a musical war machine,” Blaine said, copying Wade’s smile and letting it grow bigger. “We’re kind of the eternal underdogs.”

“Underdogs with heart,” Tina added.

“Underdogs with heart and a National Championship,” Blaine concluded, and Wade laughed.

Blaine stood out of his chair and set it back over with the others, before returning to Wade and offering him a hand. When Wade took it, Blaine pulled him up from the piano bench and into a hug. “Your audition was beautiful,” Blaine said, drawing back. “I know you meant what you were singing. New Directions kind of has this tradition of singing what we’re feeling, and I think you’ll be really good at doing that.” He tilted his head, grinning crookedly at Wade. “You’re always welcome to put something together. As Wade or Unique, whoever you want. We’ll always want to hear your voice.”

Wade looked very pleased. He bent down to retrieve his bag and slipped it back over his shoulders, then turned to look at Tina, then to Blaine. He smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

* * *

 

Blaine woke up the next morning to three emails on his phone. The first, which he allowed himself to read while still cocooned in a nest of blankets, was from Mr. Schuester, assuring him that he'd spoken to Principal Figgins, Coach Sylvester and Coach Washington, and that Figgins was looking into reinstating the Bully Whips. Blaine sent him a quick reply to thank him, then rolled out of bed to start getting ready for school.

He saved Coach Sylvester's email until he was awake enough to deal with it, fixing his hair in the bathroom mirror after his shower with the phone balanced against the taps. Hearing her insane message relayed to him in the calm, vaguely bored voice of his text-to-speech app was an exercise in surrealism, and he gave up listening somewhere around, _Even though I'm profoundly distracted by the impending birth of my first child, I'll have Becky Jackson give Coach Washington a few tips about taking down a hostile entity, which I picked up in my extensive spy training for the CIA._

It ended, _As you are still somehow romantically attached to Porcelain, despite your obvious inability to dress yourself, I won’t find a way to punish you for daring to interrupt my third trimester with your nattering requests._

Blaine snorted and dictated an email back with his hands full of hair gel, thanking Coach Sue and apologizing for the inconvenience. It took Vlingo four tries to get the word _inconvenience_ right.

He saved the final email until he was on his way out of the front door, plucking his keys from the hooks next to the doorframe.

**From:** hummelk2353@students.nyada.edu  
 **Subject:** Personally, I don’t find it particularly flattering.  
` I found this on my hard drive last night when I was procrastinating. Rachel took it. She seems insistent that you’ll like it. `

`I love you. Have a good day!`

Attached was a picture of Kurt, laughing with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, outside somewhere that Blaine didn’t recognize. His hair was windblown, the top two buttons of his shirt open with the faintest shadows of his collarbones visible. Rachel had obviously caught him while he wasn’t looking, and it was gorgeous, to see him totally candid like that. It warmed Blaine from his hair to his toes, and he stood on the front porch of his house at eight in the morning, smiling dopily, staring down at his phone. 

Eventually, he made the picture his new background, slipped the phone into his pocket, and went to school.

 

The day was shockingly uneventful. Joe approached him before lunch to give some suggestions for the recruitment numbers – all of them were either vaguely religious or classic rock, which seemed to be all Joe ever really listened to before he started at McKinley. Which was fine, obviously. They were good suggestions, and Blaine almost kept Joe too late in the hallway discussing them. He’d ended up having to run for Spanish, his dreads flying behind him, one hand raised to wave, while Blaine laughed and waved back before heading for the cafeteria. 

Harmony wasn’t there again, which he chose not to take as a bad sign. If she was quitting, she would tell them. He saw Tina frown at the empty seat once or twice. She apparently didn’t have the same thought.

Between sixth and seventh period, he was accosted in the boys’ locker room by Roz Washington. It was like trying to pass a test for which the questions were in Mandarin. She looked him up and down with her arms folded over her chest and interrogated him about Wade, and who was bothering him, and why. In the end, she said, _If that boy is a beautiful black woman on the inside, then that’s who he is, and nobody’s gonna keep him from walking down that hallway being whoever the hell he wants. You hear he’s in trouble, you come running to me. You got it? Tell him, too._

Blaine had enough time to nod before she turned around and left him standing next to his gym locker. 

Given how intimidating Coach Washington was when she was just being helpful, Blaine had good feelings about Wade being under her protection.

He’d almost escaped the day completely unscathed and was pulling the books he needed for homework out of his locker when Tina appeared at his elbow in the empty hallway and wrapped her hand around his arm, looking panicked. “Come on!” she shouted, pulling at him. “We need to go.”

“But--” Blaine, confused, tried to pull his arm away. “What are you--”

“Unique just walked in,” Tina said, frustrated, “and the rugby team saw her.”

All of the air seemed to disappear from Blaine’s lungs at once. He fumbled to slam his locker closed one-handed, and Tina took off, dragging him along, down the hall, around a corner, down another hall. “I tried to tell Coach Washington,” Tina called over the sound of their running footsteps, “but she wasn’t in her office, and I didn’t know where--”

Blaine planted his feet and yanked her to a halt, almost making both of them fall over. “Stop!” he said in a whisper. “Shh.” He tucked them both against the wall, sneaking up slowly to the corner. He’d definitely just seen—

“What are you _doing_?” Tina asked. 

“Harmony just ran by,” Blaine whispered. He’d seen her dash past the mouth of the hallway, a look of pure determination on her face. “Come on, come on--” He pulled Tina up to the corner with him and peered around to see what was going on.

Down the hall, four rugby jocks had Unique backed against a bank of frosted windows. She looked equal parts angry and terrified, with the sequins of her dress catching and reflecting the muted light, splintering it into pale shapes along the floor and ceiling. The jocks just looked angry, like they were all so morally affronted by what they were looking at that they couldn’t get their mouths to untwist out of bared white teeth, like circling dogs. Josh Coleman had the lead of his three nameless flunkies, and he was saying something too quietly for Blaine to hear, but it looked awful, from the way Unique’s face became more and more enraged and humiliated. 

But then Harmony was there. She slipped into the space between Josh and Wade, and Blaine could only see her expression in profile, but she looked _intense_. It was the razor-blade focus that Blaine had noticed the previous day, turned deadly. Unique looked surprised, eyebrows raised, anger slipping off of her face as Harmony leaned forward to start speaking. Josh Coleman had about half a foot on Harmony and had to look down to see her, and at first he just looked amused, casting his eyes from side to side at his buddies, like they were sharing in a joke. But then his face paled a little, and he pulled his attention back to Harmony, who was really leaning into it now, her voice never getting any louder than to fill the space between them. 

“What’s she _saying_?” Tina asked, watching transfixed, the way Blaine was, unable to take his eyes away from the way that the jocks were starting to shift uncomfortably and glance at each other, and at Josh, who was getting more and more pale, his eyes huge with horrified shock.

“I have no idea,” Blaine murmured.

Unique was starting to smile now, sort of reluctantly, listening to whatever Harmony was saying and biting her lip to keep from laughing as the nameless rugby guys started to take little steps away from Harmony and Josh. Her stream of speaking was breathless and unbroken, and she started to poke him in the chest with her pointer finger, as if accusing him of something, and he just stood there, taking it, looking too shocked and horrified to react. 

“What the hell are you two doing?” said a voice behind Blaine and Tina, and they both jumped and looked to see Coach Washington with her hands on her hips, staring at them. “I hear from four separate people that Asian Horror Movie’s running around this school looking for me, and then I find the two of you peeking around a corner like cartoon characters in a rejected Disney movie from the nineties. You do realize that I have things to do that don’t involve your sorry asses, right?”

“Unique’s in trouble,” Tina said quickly. “Or, well, she was, but--”

“Then why are the two of you just sitting here watching?” Coach Washington sounded like she was actually angry at them, as she moved around them to the corner to look out for herself. Then she frowned, looking confused. 

“They, uh,” Blaine said, shrugging helplessly. “I think they have it under control.”

Roz Washington whistled low. “They sure do,” she said. “I don’t know what that little girl is saying to him, but he looks like he’s about to catch fire.” She stepped back, looking at them. “Well, I’m here, so I might as well put the fear of God into that little ratfaced bastard. You tell me if anyone else gives Unique any trouble. And tell Red Beret to use her voodoo powers for good.” Then Coach Washington stepped out into the hall, and Tina and Blaine piled back against the corner to watch as she stomped down to where Harmony was still speaking and grabbed Josh Coleman by the ear. She said something to Harmony and Unique, and then dragged him off towards her office, drawing his flunkies behind her.

Harmony seemed to take a big breath. Then she turned around and stuck her hand out for Unique to shake, smiling. Blaine caught _I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced_ on her lips, before Unique started to laugh, and reached out to take Harmony’s hand.

Tina’s body relaxed next to Blaine’s. “I have no idea what just happened,” she murmured, “but I’m really glad it did.”

“Agreed,” Blaine breathed. 

They looked at each other, and smiled. Tina took his hand in hers and squeezed.

 

Harmony never told them what she said to Josh, and when Wade was asked, he'd just smile with this far-off, pleased expression. 

Unique had come back into the school decked out in full regalia because she'd had something prepared for glee club that required _being the real me_ , as she phrased it, standing at the front of the choir room while the jazz band settled themselves for her number. _Or at least as real as I can figure out so far._ She'd smiled, and pulled Harmony up to the front, saying that they'd decided to do this number together. Harmony added that they'd only had a little while to practice with each other, but she was great at improvising. Then the song started.

And Blaine was blown away, sitting there listening to the club's two newest members sing the hell out of Pink's _18 Wheeler_. 

They meant it so much. They both threw themselves into it, and the change was totally staggering in Harmony, who, Blaine realized now, had never really sung something for herself in front of him. It was phenomenal to see the real fun in her eyes, and the way that she and Unique kept looking at each other, singing at each other, almost laughing. Their voices blended beautifully. It was so, so obvious, from the way Harmony moved and smiled and meant every word, that she was going to stay. 

And it was such a relief to see Unique swinging back into who she was when she performed, big and dramatic and totally gorgeous, _If I Were A Boy_ left behind for something fantastic and loud. Being herself. It was amazing to watch. 

They charged the tiers and pulled Tina and Sugar out of their seats amid delighted laughter, dragging them to the front to sing and dance out the rest of the song. Tina looked ecstatic, mid-waltz with Harmony, laughing with her head cast back while Sugar and Unique shimmied nearby, and Blaine, not to be outplayed, leapt out of his seat and over to Joe and Artie, who danced with him, grinning and singing backup. Joe pulled Mr. Schue, who had been watching and laughing and clapping along, out of his seat to dance, too.

Across the room, Blaine met Tina's eye as she came out of a spin with Sugar. He could see that sudden knowledge in her, too, knocking into both of them, huge and bright, he was sure, on both of their faces.

This is what glee club was supposed to feel like.

* * *

 

“So, congratulations,” Kurt said, sounding fond even through the phone. “You survived your first week as glee club co-captain.”

Blaine grinned, squinting up at the sky. It was a little while before Friday’s glee rehearsal, and it was beautiful outside, the sun out and washing everything with bright gold. Blaine had sneaked out into the empty courtyard behind the cafeteria and was laying back on one of the cement tiers, his head pillowed on his free arm, his legs dangling over the edge at the knee. The stone was warm beneath him, radiating heat through his shirt and into his skin, and it felt wonderful. But, honestly, not as nice as hearing Kurt’s voice. “Did you think I wouldn’t make it?” he asked. 

“Of course I thought you’d make it,” Kurt said, as if that much was obvious. “I knew you would be good at this kind of thing.”

That was actually a surprise. Blaine blinked. “Really?”

“Why do you sound so shocked?” Kurt asked, laughing. But then he softened, and Blaine felt Kurt’s voice almost like it was a physical thing, winding its way around Blaine’s body in a warm, absent sort of hug. “You’re good with people, Blaine, no matter what you think. And people like you. They like _you_ you, not just the part of you that you want people to like. You’re a good person. You care, way more than you really need to. It’s one of the things that’s really admirable about you.”

Blaine could feel his surprise and pleasure moving through him, like it was in his blood, making every part it touched warm and luminous. “I--” he said, sort of breathless, with no idea what else to say. “Thank you. I wish you’d been here to tell me that for the last few days.”

Kurt laughed. “I think you did fine without me constantly texting you _courage_.” Blaine felt a blush crawl over his cheeks and neck at the vaguely mortifying reminder. Kurt’s voice softened again. “You did a good job, Blaine. Everything isn’t totally solved, but what ever is, really, with that group? You worked with what you had. I’m really proud of you.”

Blaine was _not_ going to start tearing up in the courtyard when anyone could just waltz by and see him. He took his arm out from beneath his head and pressed it over his eyes, swallowing hard and trying to breathe normally. _I'm really proud of you._ Kurt could say that so easily, like there was no other way he could feel. No matter how many times Blaine heard it, it was overwhelming, like it was too bright, or too deep.

“Blaine?” Kurt asked, concerned. “Are you there?”

“Yep,” Blaine said in a strangled voice. “Give me a sec.”

“Oh my god, I love you,” Kurt said, laughing. “I’m sorry. I don’t know my own strength.”

“You really don’t,” Blaine managed. He drew his hand back to press it over one cheek and then the other. Warm, but not wet. He let out a shaking breath. “Okay. Sorry. Crisis averted.”

“You really did do a good job, though,” Kurt said. “Just wait until you start dealing with pregnancy scares and people cheating with each other. Glee’s going to be a volatile little family of talent and crazy in no time.”

“I just hope that we get more members,” Blaine said. He sat up a little on his elbow, looking out over the empty tables and chairs at the bottom of the courtyard. “No one else seems to be interested. We’re putting together some numbers, but I don’t know how well they’re gonna work.”

“Oh, they’ll come,” Kurt said.

“You sound so sure,” Blaine said, smiling. 

“Of course I am,” Kurt said. “When word gets around about what you guys did for Unique – you know why we joined glee in the first place, Blaine. It’s safe. You can be who you are. And now everyone will know that, and you’ll have kids trickling in all quarter, who’re too scared or weird to join any of the other clubs, but they know that glee is a place where other people feel accepted and have fun and stick up for each other. You’re going to be up to competition standards in no time, believe me. You’ll be tripping over new talent by Christmas break.”

Blaine was rendered breathless again. He shook his head to clear it, sitting up fully, letting his feet swing and knock against the cement stair. “There’s this plaque on the wall in the choir room,” he said softly. “I never noticed it before this week.”

“Lillian Adler?” Kurt asked, and Blaine could hear the smile in his voice. “I think she was Mr. Schue’s glee club coach. ‘By its very definition--’”

“’Glee is about opening yourself up to joy,’” Blaine finished. He smiled himself, once again casting his head back to stare up at the cloudless blue sky. “I want to make sure that’s the way things work this year. I think that’s how it’s always been.”

“You can do it,” Kurt said, and Blaine knew he really believed. “Lead by example.”

“I’m gonna try,” Blaine agreed. He brought the phone down to look at the time before pressing it back to his ear. “I have to get going. Glee practice. We’re doing the wrap-up song.”

“Oo, what song?” Kurt asked.

Blaine grinned. “ _C’Mon_ , by Fun. and Panic! at the Disco. Tina suggested it.”

“I’ll have to look it up.”

“I think it works.” Blaine tucked the phone closer to his ear. “I love you. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

“I love you, too,” Kurt murmured, very warm. “Talk to you tonight. Have fun.”

“Definitely.”

 

_So c’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me, I’d like to believe in all the possibilities._

There was a moment, on the stage, with the lights hot above him and the boards solid beneath him, when Blaine came to a realization: 

They were good. 

The voices swelling around him were strong and bright, layering into harmonies beneath the duet that he was sharing with Tina. They made the song full and resonant, making Blaine feel like he was being lifted up and carried along by it, making it feel effortless, and so fun, and so freeing. They were all so happy, and Blaine could feel it in every word as they all sang together, this great crescendo swept up by the band, sweeping into him as he stood at the center of the stage and let himself _feel_ it. There were no pockets where old voices were missing, no little vocal ghosts or holes in the choreography. This was _theirs_ , his and Tina’s and Artie’s and everyone else’s. 

This was the new voice of New Directions. They’d found it.

As Tina drew out the last word of the song with the two of them stood at the very edge of the stage, she gave a little curtsy to Mr. Schue clapping and whooping in the seats. When she straightened back up, she met Blaine’s eyes with a brilliant smile. She looked so proud. Blaine felt the exact same way.

He dipped his own flourished little bow at their audience of one, and was immediately tackled by six laughing, excited bodies, jumping, group-hugging, shrieking about how great that was, how good they were together, how fun. Blaine hugged back, and shrieked back, and was so, so excited.

This year was going to be amazing.


End file.
